Coffee House Shots: Michael Heseltine on Thatcher, Boris and Badenoch

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🗓️ 29 March 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

An MP for 35 years, Michael Heseltine served as Environment Secretary and then Defence Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Following his well-publicised resignation in 1986, he returned to government under John Major and was Deputy Prime Minister for the last two years of Major’s premiership. Once seen as a potential successor to Thatcher and Major, he has sat in the Lords since stepping down as an MP in 2001, and in recent years has been an outspoken critic of Brexit.

Lord Heseltine sits down with James Heale to discuss his thoughts on the current Labour government, how to fix Britain’s broken economy and why devolution should go further. ‘Deeply depressed’ by attacks on the civil service – Britain’s ‘rolls royce’ – he provides his thoughts on various political leaders: Starmer is handling Trump well, Reeves is handling the economy badly, Badenoch is being overshadowed by foreign affairs, and Boris Johnson demonstrated he has ‘no integrity’. And on Thatcher, he says new information has vindicated him over the Westland affair and demonstrated her ‘complicity’. His new book, From Acorns to Oaks: An Urgent Agenda to Rebuild Britain, is out now.

Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of Coffee House Shots is sponsored by Alliance Witten Investment Trust. From the OPEC
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0:13.4	premiership. There has been no shortage of economic crises over the last 58 years. And yet,
0:19.6	throughout that time, every single year, without fail,
0:22.9	we've paid out an increased dividend to our shareholders. In fact, Alliance Witten's history
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0:35.5	If you're looking for a less stressful way to invest in stocks and shares,
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0:51.6	Hello and welcome to this special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill and I'm delighted to be joined today by Lord Haslton, for Environment Secretary and Defence Secretary 2. Lord Haslton, thank you very much for coming today.
1:03.2	Great pleasure. And you've obviously got now a second book of your memoirs out. I think something like 24 years after the first one, Life in the Jungle. Tell us why
1:12.9	this book and why now? Well, this is not the book I ever intended to write. I thought I'd done a
1:19.9	biography and I would not be back in public life after 1997. And then, of course, what happened was that David Cameron invited me, first of all,
1:32.5	to write a suggestion for the manifesto, invited me to go to Liverpool with him, and step
1:39.3	by step, I was back in the corridor of power.
1:42.2	So really, the book had two purposes.
1:45.4	One was to update my political experience.
1:49.9	And secondly, to satisfy my own curiosity
1:53.5	as to whether any of the things I'd done in government
1:56.6	actually had any real lasting effect.
2:00.0	And your conclusion of that was?
2:01.7	I think that I can claim to have played a role in the devolution of power from London to the great cities.
2:14.1	I think I can claim a role to have shown how you regenerate deprived urban areas.
	...

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